Nicholas Tozier

When I was a boy I dreamed often about our house and the things in it—but something would always be a little strange, a little different.

A secret compartment in a table opened. There would be old letters or little statues inside.

A passageway in the closet led down to an entire underground floor of the house we didn’t know about. There were cramped, miniature kitchens, a dripping faucet, low-ceilinged rooms full of slumped bookshelves down there.

The dark corners of the attic led to a walkway in the rafters. My grandmother and I, walking carefully on the beams, stood over a vast pit of dirt and mud that tiny workers far below scurried to excavate.

I watched the shadows on the wall with horror as some behemoth from the cellar devoured my father.

I didn’t always realize it had been a dream. I talked about these spaces in enough detail that it spooked my parents.

I always tried to find my way back to these hidden stashes and spaces after waking. In dreams everything I look at writhes with deeply-rooted symbolism. I feel alive and at home there.

Once in awhile I still wake up with a sense of loss, like the act of waking severed an umbilicus connected to inner truths. The strange flesh of dreams pushes me back to the surface and knits shut beneath me and I wash up blinking in the sunlight of this world where so, so, so many things symbolize nothing.

surreal photo by muffinn

Over the past few days I’ve been watching military documentaries, taking notes on the discipline of elite specialists like the Rangers, Marine Combat Divers, and Navy EODs. What can I learn from men and women whose lives depend on brutal training?

A Marine Combat Diver must find inner calm even while rough surf flips him upside down and twists him around in blind darkness, plucking the air hose from his mouth again and again until his lungs burn and primal panic sets in. He also must learn to take off his own oxygen equipment and troubleshoot it blind, by touch alone, while his pulse pounds and his oxygen-starved brain slips into unconsciousness.

Then there’s "drown-proofing", during which recruits must endure extended periods in the pool, fighting to stay above water with their wrists and ankles bound.

The ocean is a harsh place for a mammal. Instructors work hard to simulate the stress of combat, depriving their students of sleep, food, and even air. But none of this is cruel, none of it is meant to break recruits. Every drill carefully, methodically, and safely prepares the student to handle stress and survive against all odds.

Every coping mechanism is denied. Every comfort zone is shattered. Students are drilled, verbally damned, physically driven far past exhaustion.

At any point a diver can stop the pain and stop the panic with a simple signal followed by two words poolside: "I withdraw." Within minutes he’s out of the water, out of the program, breathing delicious air while his classmates fight on in hopes of completing these harsh (but carefully monitored and safe) training exercises. Quit, and you must start the program all over again if you still dream of being a combat diver.

The recruits who make the cut are rare individuals with zenlike toughness and complete technical mastery. The kinds of men and women who’ll happily dive naked into the mouth of Hell itself and swim back to you with the devil’s severed tail clenched between their teeth.

There’s no such training regimen for writers. No instructors to push you beyond the limit. Yet somehow we need to muster the same level of focus, and push on, and find ways to train ourselves.

displaced land mammal photo by ed bierman